"Sting"
The SmartLess podcast hosts Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett interview music legend Sting, discussing his upbringing in northeast England near a shipyard, the formation of The Police, his solo career, and his current theatrical production 'The Last Ship.' The conversation spans topics including vocal health, jazz appreciation, AI's impact on music, activism, and Sting's philosophy on songwriting and artistry.
Summary
The episode begins with the typical SmartLess format of casual banter between the three hosts — Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes, and Will Arnett — discussing mundane topics like wearing slippers in public, eating spaghetti with Swedish fish, Justin Theroux's habit of sleeping shirtless on planes, and debating the merits of Crocs as footwear. The hosts then build anticipation before revealing their surprise guest as Sting.
Once Sting joins, the conversation turns to vocal health, where he explains that the voice is a muscle requiring warm-up exercises like lip trills, and that he developed his projection as a child by selling newspapers outside a shipyard by singing 'Evening Chronicle!' to attract customers. He recounts how a guitar left behind by a family friend ('Uncle John') who emigrated to Canada became his escape mechanism from working-class life in Wallsend, a shipyard town near Newcastle in northeast England. He taught himself to play largely by ear, supplemented by lessons from a retired music teacher.
Sting discusses his pre-fame life in detail, noting that he was a schoolteacher in a mining village before pursuing music professionally. He was already a father, married, owned a car, paid taxes, and voted — experiences he credits for giving him the grounded perspective that informs his songwriting. He moved to London with one phone number and a dream, auditioning for cocktail bar gigs and doing modeling work, including a film shoot for a jewelry advertisement directed by Ridley Scott.
The hosts ask about The Police's formation and the band's rapid output of five albums in five years, ending with 'Synchronicity' in 1983. Sting explains his decision to leave the band at its peak as a deliberate strategic choice to avoid diminishing returns and to preserve his artistic freedom — contrasting himself with bands like the Rolling Stones who became 'welded together.' His subsequent solo work with the Blue Turtles band, documented in the film 'Bring on the Night,' is praised for its musical complexity, with Sting explaining his strategy of always hiring musicians better than himself to elevate his own performance.
A significant portion of the conversation focuses on 'The Last Ship,' Sting's musical theater piece about the shipbuilding community of his childhood. He describes it as a deeply emotional project in which his deceased parents feel spiritually present on stage every night. He discusses upcoming performances at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City, where the set recreates a full shipyard at operatic scale. He explains that the musical emerged from a period of writer's block in his 40s, when he redirected his songwriting outward — toward the stories of his community — rather than inward, resulting in songs that came out like 'projectile vomiting' after being stored for years.
Sting discusses his Sting 3.0 touring project, which strips his catalog down to guitar, bass, drums, and voice to reveal the structural integrity of the songs themselves. He also reflects on the advent of MTV, noting that British bands had an advantage because they had already been making promotional videos for Top of the Pops when they couldn't appear in person.
On the topic of AI, Sting argues that while AI can produce technically serviceable music, it lacks the lived human experience — heartbreak, love, family history — that makes music truly listenable rather than merely heard. He draws an analogy to how 19th-century visual artists responded to photography not by competing with it but by inventing Impressionism. He expresses cautious optimism that human artists will similarly sidestep AI's perfection to create something more meaningful.
Sting also discusses his long-standing activism, including protecting a rainforest area the size of Belgium and the Netherlands alongside his wife Trudie Styler, and lamenting the incursions made under the Bolsonaro government. He reflects on his 45-year partnership with Trudie Styler, which he describes as one of his greatest fortunes in life. The episode closes with the hosts expressing genuine awe at having had the opportunity to speak with someone who has been a defining musical figure throughout their entire lives.
Key Insights
- Sting argues that the bass guitar is a strategic instrument for a bandleader-vocalist because playing the bottom line while singing the top line means the rest of the band must operate within his bandwidth, giving him subtle harmonic control over the entire ensemble.
- Sting claims that his decision to leave The Police at the height of their success was deliberate and strategic — he believed everything after that point would be diminishing returns and that if he didn't leave then, he never would.
- Sting describes his period of writer's block in his 40s as being resolved by redirecting his songwriting outward toward the stories of his community rather than inward toward his own psyche, which freed up songs that felt stored for decades.
- Sting asserts that AI can create technically competent music but that a fundamental difference exists between 'hearing' and 'listening' — listeners can detect that a machine has never had its heart broken, and that absence makes AI music ultimately unconvincing.
- Sting draws an analogy between AI's threat to musicians and photography's 19th-century threat to visual artists, arguing that just as photographers prompted painters to invent Impressionism, artists will sidestep AI's perfectionism to create something distinctly human.
- Sting recounts that a teenage peer introduced him to Thelonious Monk's solo live album with the advice to listen to it multiple nights in a row even if he hated it — by the third night, he felt a previously closed part of his brain had opened to complex harmony.
- Sting explains that 'Message in a Bottle' was written while he was living in a Bayswater basement flat, feeling like a castaway because his London dream was not yet being realized, and that his only audience at the time was his dog.
- Sting states that performing 'The Last Ship' creates a spiritual connection with his deceased parents, who feel present on stage every night, and that his brother wept from start to finish when he saw the production in Amsterdam.
- Sting claims that one of his first professional film appearances was in a jewelry advertisement directed by Ridley Scott for RSA, during his early London years when he was taking any available work to survive.
- Sting describes his Sting 3.0 project as an experiment to strip songs down to guitar, bass, drums, and voice to test whether the compositions were structurally sturdy enough to stand without orchestration — and found the resulting dynamics were simultaneously louder and quieter.
- Sting argues that the loss of the physical album experience — liner notes, credits, artwork, cellophane removal — has reduced music from a rich cultural artifact to a commodity like coffee, stripping listeners of the contextual world that makes songs richer.
- Sting credits his pre-fame adult life — being a teacher, a father, a husband, a taxpayer, and a voter — as the foundation of his psychological balance, suggesting that artists who skip these experiences lack the grounded perspective that sustains a long creative career.
Topics
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